Nationalism, Methodological

Methodological nationalism is when social scientists naturalize the state or nation as a unit of analysis in their research. That is, it is when scholars assume or imply that the territorial states or national communities are a priori entities, rather than socially constructed concepts. There is no dedicated body of literature that analyzes methodological nationalism, but when explicitly engaged by geographers, it is critiqued for a number of overlapping reasons. First, geographers suggest that methodological nationalism is problematic because it theoretically misrepresents and depoliticizes the global production of space and spatial relations. Second, it is critiqued as a form of nationalism that simultaneously clouds objective analysis and provincializes academic inquiry by (re)entrenching state-contained academic disciplines.